Startup Policy Lab’s Charles Belle Takes on Industry-Leading Compliance Initiative for STORE

STORE, a zero-fee, programmable cryptocurrency with a checks-and-balances governance, welcomes Charles Belle to lead the company’s compliance activities in an advisory role.

STORE, a zero-fee, programmable cryptocurrency with a checks-and-balances governance, welcomes Charles Belle to lead the company’s compliance activities in an advisory role.

Charles is the founder and director of Startup Policy Lab, which promotes innovative, open, and data-driven policymaking. Working at the intersection of law and emerging technologies, he called the compliance role for STORE, “the perfect match between tech and regulation. It’s very similar to launching in any heavily regulated space.”

Working with Chief Technology Officer Rag Bhagavatha, Charles will help STORE with banking infrastructure for its ecosystem and assist in building our blockchain rules engine to honor national regulations for cryptocurrencies.

STORE will require Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering checks for all decentralized workers participating on the blockchain. With KYC and AML data for dWorkers, STORE software nodes will be regulatory-compliant on a country-by-country basis.

“We’re going to honor the regulation, but we’re going to build a tool that allows us to comply in a more efficient, effective, and transparent manner to open the door to innovation and greater participation,” he said.

Since the laws vary in the countries where validators will work on the STORE blockchain, Charles’ work will help validators stay compliant with local laws. The challenge, he says, is to create a tool that operates a distributed ledger technology while honoring the many sets of regulations.

Antone Johnson, STORE’s general counsel, said the team looks forward to Charles’ efforts.

“Distributed ledger technology has outgrown its scrappy startup phase and entered awkward adolescence. Sustaining nimble execution and decentralization with accountability under a wide range of evolving compliance regimes worldwide is no mean feat,” Antone said. “Joining the STORE team at this critical juncture, Charles will lead the charge to set a new industry benchmark with excellence and professionalism.”

STORE believes this emphasis on compliance creates a unique advantage for being embedded in traditional financial infrastructure around the world.

In addition to supporting compliance efforts, Charles will help create a scalable rules engine that maintains up-to-date institutional knowledge of the rules governing transactions.

“It’s building out the tech aspect and marrying legal with technical, to set a model for how blockchain initiatives can strike this balance,” Charles said. “This takes our compliance to another level and makes it competitive with other transactional companies.”

This rules engine will benefit developers, merchants, validators and every country where transactions take place.

“Developers and merchants won’t have to worry about building cost prohibitive internal compliance mechanisms, [since] STORE can do it for them at scale,” Charles said. “That’s good for developers, and it’s good for merchants because they can operate on the platform, good for validators because they can participate without worrying about violating local laws, and great for countries seeking to encourage innovation and economic growth.”

He also will also assist in overseeing token sale events to ensure that buyers and the company comply with Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.

Charles said he expects the SEC to continue to treat tokens as securities, but is intrigued with recent comments from William Hinman, director of the division of corporation finance at the SEC indicating that the SEC might not consider securities regulations necessary for "sufficiently decentralized networks and systems." For at least the next 12 to 18 months, he expects this will be a substantial focus for companies and their lawyers.

Before founding Startup Policy Labs, Charles was the executive director of the Institute for Innovation Law at the University of California, Hastings, College of Law, where he also directed the Privacy Project.

About STORE: STORE is a zero-fee cryptocurrency for the public internet that is coordinated by a Governance of checks and balances Inflation is dynamically pegged to the number of tokens staked by digital Workers, who are in turn rewarded for contributing resources to the protocol's validation, governance, security, and scalability mechanisms.

The rate of inflation grows proportionally to the growth of total value staked, reaching a hard cap at 51% of total supply staked: at this limit, annual token inflation flatlines at 2%.

Economics and Security on STORE are determined by the real-time state of its Dynamic Proof of Stake protocol (DyPoS).

The STORE blockchain is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2019.